On the cover of my Art Journal

Don’t laugh now. I have started my art journal and have tried to come up with my first “entry” using a 4″ x “6 unlined index card, and what art pens I had handy here on my desk. So I spent the better part of my lunch hour putting this together, and here it is.

I know I have to work harder at photographing the finished work but I was too excited to really give it all that much attention.

I was torn between waiting to get my materials together and just doing it spontaneously, but spontaneity won in the end. It took me 5 sheets to complete the work, and although I was initially tempted to actually print the title on the page and color over, I thought I’d give it a try doing freehand doodling and then coloring it in. I used to do a lot of this in a previous life when I did my school work and my greeting cards.

I had very limited pens on hand — and the mommy in me had some crayons that I would occasionally fish out of my purse left over from restaurant visits and coloring sheets that had kept the tyke preoccupied. I would unload them in my desk drawer from time to time to have something stashed away for those times the little boy was here.

I have been fancying swirls the last couple of weeks and decided to work on that for this layout, principally because they were easy and top of mind.

I did the four-color swirl trim first, then needed to cut it out of the original sheet because I didn’t like how my lettering went. “ART” came out beautifully the first time, but “JOURNAL EVERYDAY” took three attempts before I was happy. Within the trim (just above the yellow swirl), I inserted my tag (Pinaynewyorker) and below it, I put the date, then filled in all the other empty spaes with plain black swirls, after which I colored the whole background a watery lavander.

Before “assembling” the different elements, I drew the background in pink and blue around the “JOURNAL EVERYDAY” scribbling, then I pasted the four swirls. I also chose to do a black border around the paper just by running my chisel-edge marker on the edge of the page and then I pasted the four-color swirl. Rather than just pasting “ART”, the scrapbooker in me made me pull my staple out and staple the word onto the piece. I wanted more than just the project name in front and it wasn’t hard for me to come up with “A personal journey” which I printed on a piece of kraft folder in Adler font which I also stapled to the postcard.

I joined the Flickr Group where similar and much better works are displayed and I am almost ashamed to show my work on the same page as the great art I see there!

But Art Journaling, much like blogging, is a very personal thing for me. I like being with a group that inspires creativity in me and helps me to bring out that part deep inside me which I keep suppressed in the midst of work and motherhood.

Angelo will get such a kick out of seeing “mom’s art”, I am sure. I actually want to collaborate with him in working on my “suns” which he admired when he saw the first time I worked on my scribblings. Soon.